I’ve been really busy lately with work, travel, being a dad, husband, etc and haven’t really posted anything significant in a while. So what have I been up to?
Last month, I took a long weekend trip and flew to Seattle to visit Sean and Tim and Bridgette’s family, and go to a Mighty Mighty Bosstone’s concert (YAH!). While in Seattle, Sean and I visited one of my co-workers, Debbie, at her parent’s cafe – Chelan Cafe. Its a great place with AWESOME food. On our way out to the cafe, we drove by an import dealership and saw this parked on the street:
Its a VERY rare BMW M1 and it was in awesome shape. In the sun, you could see the carbon fiber reflecting back under the pearlescent paint.
So after our brunch at Chelan Cafe, Sean and I got on the road for our drive to Portland, OR, to visit Corey, Aija, and their newborn daughter Zora. I haven’t seen Corey and Aija since Stephen’s wedding, and have never been to Portland. on the way up, we passed this weird sculpture:
Its a very pretty city. We had some good meals there (especially lunch the next day!) and hanging out with old friends made the weekend worthwhile.
While in Seattle, I got to hang out with Tim, Bridgette, Rylee and Tyler. Turns out Rylee and Brig are big fans of So You Think You Can Dance, which is my anti-masculine guilty pleasure TV Show that Emily got me addicted to. Rylee LOVES the show. She knows every name, dance style, choreographer, etc of every person on the show. The three of us watch the show while Sean and Tim played some PS3 game 🙂
I got to swim in the Snohomish (?) river. The river was VERY high and the curretn was so strong that sean and I couldn’t get more than 10 or 15 feet from the bank without getting a chance of us getting swept away. A great public park..things you just don’t see in this area. Another thing that was great? I actually got to see the sun shine in the Pac NW. The three or four times I’ve been up there, its always rained (surprise!).
So the last night there, Sean, Tim, and I went to see my all time favorite band, The Might Mighty Bosstones. They got back together and this was the main purpose of my trip – to see them again. Of all the concerts I have been to, I”ve seen them the most. I think this was my 5th or 6th time seeing them. This show did not let me down. I’ll post some video and photos (ala cell phone so not great…) at a later time.

So fast forward to a week or so ago. For Father’s day, Emily got me a gift cert for Boi na Braza (sp?), a Brazillian steakhouse in Cincinnati. For those not familiar, these places charge a flat rate and you get a pretty decent salad bar. Also, they have waiters walking around with 15 different cuts of meat – sirloin, lamb chops, chicken breasts, filet mignon, and plenty of others. It was amazing. While NOT cheap, one of the things Emily and I enjoyed the most was the personal time. The wait staff doesn’t bother you. Because you let them know when you want more food, they basically stay away from your table unless you need a refill on your beverage. We had a great time talking all night without some person interrupting us to see if we wanted to buy something else. And MANY thanks to Aunt SheShe for watching Sean so we could have some time out. Oh..and the deserts are freaking great too! I love a perfectly cooked flan. Their wine list is pretty decent also. We had a nice pinot grigio.

Coming soon – my twin brother Sean is flying in from Seattle for a visit over Labor Day weekend. When he is here, my mom, Megan, and Megan’s boyfriend Matt, plan on coming down and we are hoping to see Stephen and Amy as well. (Little) Sean is going to have a BLAST!

Tonight, I gave Sean one of my die-cast cars. Its a Porsche that I got when I was in the 8th or 9th grade as a Christmas present from (I think) my grandmother’s brother, my Uncle Jack McNaughton (the Scottish side!). Sean LOVED it. Its bright orange. When Emily picked him up to take him to bed he cried. He wanted his car! So she gave it to him and carried him upstairs. Up in his room, she tried to get him to put it down on his dresser so they could get ready for bed. He wanted nothing to do with that. He was hugging and snuggling her…while hugging and snuggling his new car!! I knew I loved this kid for a reason!!
Can’t wait to see what happens when he finds out I have 20 or 30 diecast cars in storage 😉 He likes that orange Porsche 959 so much he may go into overdrive if sees the others! 🙂

Last night Uncle Phillip and Gramma got back from their trip to the Cabin and NYC and Phillip brought Sean back a present! Sean is now the proud owner of some Air Jordans!
He thought they were so cool. He is wearing them to “school” today. Phillip has a matching pair so we’ll have to get a photo of them wearing them together. He is in size sixes now, and when he gets to size sevens he gets to wear his Chucks that Megan and Matt got him 🙂

Happy birthday dear Reagan, haaaaappy birthdaaaaaaaay, toooooooo yoooooooooooouuuuuuu! (that was a typed version of us singing). Today is Sean’s girlfriend/best friend/future wife’s 1st birthday! We can’t believe that she’s already a year old. Wow. Time sure flies. Here’s some pictures to show how much she’s grown! What a cute girl. We’re missing her birthday party today since we’re in New York, but I’m sure that we’ll get together to celebrate when we get home.

So on the 11th, I received an email from our hosting company, BlueHost.com, that the server would be undergoing maintenance to improve performance all around.

The server paulandemily.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately

10PM MST October 11th

We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours, but could becompleted long before that window. This upgrade will greatly increase performance on your server and therefor your account. We apologizefor any inconvenience.
BlueHost Support

Unfortunately that 1 to 2 hour window is now up to 6 days. I chatted with a bluehost.com live rep from their website (after having one completely ignore and the chat die from inactivity…thanks). He said that the admins invested $32,000 into memory for this server and they are merging two physical servers into one. Maybe they should have invested in CPUs instead of memory because I keep hitting a CPU bottleneck. I guess their upgrade did not go smoothly and the expiration for the migration has now been changed to:
Expires: Fri Oct 17 07:20:13 2008
I know a few of my blog readers have their websites hosted on my account so I wanted to give a heads up. You can track the maintenance a bit by going here:http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/ (edit: added thanks to Sean)
type your domain into the box and click submit. Right now its telling me:
Server Load:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: Box under heavy load — you may experience degraded system performance
Services:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: box56 and box57 merged into this server to provide better services for our customers
The CPU load on the server is really high. This server has 8 CPUs (or 8 cores..can’t really tell) and its got a CPU load of 18.02, so that means that the server’s CPUs are over loaded. 18.02 load/8 cores = 2.2525 load average per core. That means that when the processor was working on one process, there was 1.25 other processes waiting to be executed. Think of it as going to your favorite grocery store and they have 8 checkout lanes open and 18 people waiting to purchase their goods. The processes are the shopping carts and the contents of the carts vary so some take longer than others to check out.

Anyway, if you get an error about the site hogging CPU time or something about it being suspended, bear with me and refresh a few minutes later. Same goes for AshandBrian.com, GSGates.net, KurtandJodie.com, AJAllen.net, 92Turbo.com, Go2Fast.net, LaryandNarni.com, HearnHappenings.com, MatthewandAmberly.com, and a couple other sites I host. TTFN

We had a really fun weekend. My mom came down from St. Louis on Saturday and stayed until Monday. On Sunday, we went to the Conservatory and the Art Museum. The conservatory was really pretty – alot of cool plants. I would have taken more photos, but our main lens for the Nikon D80 is on the fritz so I was using my backup Olympus 750UZ. We didn’t get much time in the Art Museum, but we were able to visit a number of the wings and exhibits. Will have to go back there soon. Sunday night we had dinner at Teak for Emily’s birthday. Its a thai place. Brian tried to order his food with a spice level of 10 (on a scale of 1 to 10), but luckily he let us talk him out of it and ordered a 5 🙂
Monday, mom got to spend the day with Sean while we were at work. We are going to visit her this weekend too, so that will be nice quiet weekend away from Cinci.

http://hearnhappenings.com/
Cary and Jyll Hearn are now blogging! Cary was Brian’s Best Man at his wedding (and vice versa). They recently asked me to set a blog up for them – and eventually a gallery when i get a spare few minutes. Welcome to the blogosphere guys!

We traveled to St. Louis over Memorial Day Weekend to visit Paul’s family, and to attend Stephen’s wedding (friend of Paul’s). We had a great time and took a ton of pictures!

Still working on getting the wedding pictures online.

See pictures of Sean during the weekend by clicking below:

Sean’s getting so big! Just a few days ago, he started grabbing toys with his hand, then with both hands and then bringing the toy to his mouth. He loves this new skill and tends to hold on to his toys for 5-10 minutes at a time! He also is very talkative lately. He loves when people have “conversations” with him; mimicking the noises that he makes. He cracks up laughing and keeps the conversation going until you stop it. So cute.

I’m going to start getting some videos of Sean, hopefully on a weekly basis, and putting them on our youtube account. He’s doing so many new things each week, and we want everyone to be able to enjoy the milestones along with us. Plus, he’s so darn cute, who could resist a movie of him?? 😉